Florida Birther Sues To Remove Obama From Ballot, With Support From Sheriff Joe Arpaio

Remember when Donald Trump and his friends were all, "Obama can't be president, he was secretly born in Kenya!" Then Obama released his original birth certificate from Hawaii and they were like, "Never mind!"

If you thought that was the end of the argument, oh how wrong you were. The latest salvo from the birther movement comes to a Florida courtroom today, where a Plantation resident named Michael Voeltz will argue Obama shouldn't be on the ballot because his father wasn't a U.S. citizen. None other than Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio is in Voeltz's corner.

"Even if Obama was born on the Oval Office desk, he's still not eligible to be president," Voeltz tells Riptide.

Voeltz, a native South Floridian who works as a Toyota salesman, says he started researching the law after Obama's election and now "knows more about the Constitution than most attorneys."

(Voeltz, it's worth noting, also continues to question the legitimacy of that certificate. "That's not a document that's been produced. It's a picture on a website," he says.)

Instead of claiming Obama was born overseas, Voeltz will argue that the Founding Fathers' definition of "natural-born citizen" was much more stringent than most believe. Simply being born in Hawaii isn't enough to make Obama a natural-born citizen, Voeltz claims, because the Framers intended future presidents to be born to two citizen parents.

In fact, the Supreme Court has never weighed in on what exactly the Constitution means by "natural-born citizen."

The weight of legal and historical authority indicates that the term "natural born" citizen would mean a person who is entitled to U.S. citizenship "by birth" or "at birth," either by being born "in" the United States and under its jurisdiction, even those born to alien parents.

What's more, lower courts have already looked at the same issues raised by Voeltz; in 2009, the Indiana Court of Appeals rejected a similar case and found that the term "natural born citizen" includes "any child born in the U.S."

Also worth noting, via Media Matters for America: Four other U.S. presidents had parents born overseas: Andrew Jackson's dad was from Norther Ireland, while Chester A. Arthur and James Buchanan had Irish dads; Herbert Hoover's mom was Canadian.

Voeltz's main precedent will surely raise some eyebrows as well -- he'll lean on Minor vs. Happersett, a case that found that the Constitution didn't give women the right to vote (and clouded the issue of whether those born on U.S. land are automatically citizens in the process).

Tim Elfrink is an award-winning investigative reporter, the managing editor of the Miami New Times and the co-author of "Blood Sport: Alex Rodriguez and the Quest to End Baseball's Steroid Era." Since 2008, he's written in-depth pieces on police corruption, fatal shootings and social justice issues across South Florida. He's won the George Polk Award and has been a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.